


Homecoming

by Isis



Category: Shining Company - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 07:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis/pseuds/Isis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prosper returns from Constantinople.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carmarthen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmarthen/gifts).



He had only just placed his hand on the gate-latch when the big hound careened around the side of the small thatch-roofed house, barking joyfully as it bounded up to him. It seemed almost as though it were dancing, turning right and then stepping left; then it rolled on the grass before him and jumped up again, wagging its tail and making little ecstatic noises in its throat.

A young woman rushed out of the house. The dark braids that encircled her head like a crown were coming loose, and vainly she tried to tuck them up into some semblance of order as she scolded the dog. "Gelert! You mustn't carry on so, it is ill-mannered!" Turning to the man, she added, "I'm sorry, he greets every visitor this way. It is only that he…" Her words trailed off, and her face bloomed into a smile.

"Only you are not just any visitor, are you, Prosper. Small wonder he is so happy! He has been waiting for you these seven years."

Prosper opened and stepped through the gate and let the large shaggy head push into his hand. "He has been in good company, haven't you, Gelert, my old boy?"

Gelert woofed blissfully, and Prosper laughed; then he turned to Luned, for of course it was she. At first he had thought he had not known her, as she had not known him when first he came to the gate. But when she smiled, he thought that he could never have forgotten – she had not changed at all.

And then the cottage door opened again and a small girl peered around the edge; a girl of perhaps three or four years in a dress of deep brown that matched her dark hair and eyes. "Mama!" she cried reproachfully. "It is only silly old Gelert barking again." She scurried down the path and caught hold of Luned's hand, then looked up at Prosper, eyes bright and curious.

Just like that, it seemed to Prosper as though Luned changed again in his eyes. Now she was neither a stranger nor familiar. The years had turned her into someone different from his boyhood friend, but it was still Luned that stood before him. She had wed Conn, that he had known; it should have been entirely unsurprising that she was now a mother. But he found it oddly unsettling.

Prosper gave Gelert's shaggy head one last fond pat. "And you, Luned? I see you have not been idle whilst you waited these past seven years."

He felt ashamed the moment the words left his lips, but she did not blush. "We are both very happy to see you as well. As is this one, though she doesn't know it yet," she added, with a smile at her daughter. "Áine, this is your uncle Prosper, home at last."

"I am pleased to meet you," he said, squatting down to her level and inclining his head gravely. Áine giggled and hid behind Luned before shyly peeking back at him.

What an odd thing for Luned to say, he thought as he followed her along the path behind the house to the forge. This was not his home, this small village on the shores of Ériu. It was not even his own land, though it was closer in both distance and in familiarity than the Eastern cities he had been travelling through during these past years.

He had been to his land not four weeks before; or at least, it was the land where he had been raised. It had seemed unfamiliar when he had first returned to it, like Luned had seemed when he saw her by the gate. His father Gerontius had grey in his hair; his brother Owain now had three sons, and his wife, sweet simple Nerys, had become as fat and soft as a pillow stuffed with feathers, as Luned had once predicted. Old Nurse had died two winters ago, and in her place was an unfamiliar woman with a round face and thick arms. 

Nobody had remained as they had been in Prosper's memory. And it was clear to him they, too, were expecting the Prosper who had left to join Prince Gorthyn seven years before, not the stranger he had become. It had been a good visit; but it had felt good to bid them farewell.

Conn he had seen most recently, of course, though it had been years since their parting at Dyn Eidin. But when Prosper walked into the forge and saw him stoking the furnace as a young boy plied the leather bellows, all he could think was that Conn had not changed at all. Perhaps he was broader in the shoulders; perhaps slightly browner. But he was Conn, and when he saw Prosper his face brightened, and immediately he moved to embrace his old friend.

* * *

That evening, after Áine had been given her supper and put to bed, the three of them sat around the hearth-fire with stew and bread and a jar of beer that Luned had fetched up from the storage-place under the floor. They talked of Conn's smithy and Luned's delight in Ériu: "It is astonishingly green in the summer here, and the people have been so welcoming."

"Was Father so disapproving, then? He told me you would have been welcome to stay, but perhaps he was only saying what he thought I wanted to hear."

"Oh, no," said Luned quickly. "He gave us his blessing."

"He would have kept me on to work the forge," said Conn.

"So you didn't stay because you wanted to return to Ériu."

Conn looked at Luned and shrugged. "To be truthful, I had no memory of Ériu. I mind my mother's face, and my father's voice. But no more."

"It was I that wanted to come," said Luned. She was doing some mending in her lap, and her shining silver needle flew back and forth, glinting in the firelight, though it seemed she hardly looked at it. "It is only that you and Conn left me behind when you went with Prince Gorthyn. You both were off on a great journey, and I – I wanted to see more than just your father's valley."

"Well, now you have," said Prosper with a smile.

"And you – you have seen even more of the world! Tell us of your travels."

So he spun them stories of his journey with Cynan across the Kingdom of the Franks and the Kingdom of the Lombards, of taking ship to Constantinople and of coming into its harbour, the curving estuary called the Golden Horn. "It is a city like nothing I have ever seen," he told them. "There are great palaces and gilded monuments, and markets where one can buy silk and spices from even farther to the east. And people from every land – tall men from the north with long yellow beards, and men from the south who are as brown as peat."

"So what did you there?" asked Luned.

"Cynan offered his sword to the Emperor against the Avars and the Sassenids, and I went with him."

"I would think he would have had enough of fighting," said Conn quietly.

"It is what he knows. And it was what he needed to do." It had been the fighting that had healed Cynan, as much as anything Prosper had done, he knew. It was in battle that Cynan could forget all that had happened before and lose himself in the present. He became a creature of pure action: moving as one with his horse, sword flashing high, his only purpose to strike the enemy down. It had seemed to Prosper that Cynan had gone into battle with no care for himself; that he had hoped for death, and so death had passed him by.

"But for myself, I have had enough of fighting," Prosper added. "The Golden City is in turmoil now, with a new Emperor and new enemies at the gates. Cynan is content – it is the city he cares for, not the man at its head – but I would put away my sword for a time."

"He must be well enough, if you would leave him."

"I left him in another's care; he married the daughter of his general." He said it lightly, as though it had not wounded him, but he knew Conn was not fooled by his tone. "And although he would give me a place in his household, I had it in my heart to return to my old land, and to see you both again."

"Cynan wed to an Eastern lady," mused Conn. "Did someone send word to the Princess Niamh, that she would not be waiting for her wandering prince forever?"

"I think she knew when he left that he would not return," said Prosper. "It is a hard thing to ride into battle with three hundred warriors, and come home alone."

"Not alone," said Luned, and she reached out to touch Conn with one hand and Prosper with the other. "But what of you, Prosper? Were there no Eastern beauties that caught your eye?"

"None so beautiful as you," he teased, turning his hand so her fingers were caught in his own. Then it came to him that maybe this was not something one should say to another man's wife, and hastily he dropped Luned's hand.

A look passed between Conn and Luned, a look that made Prosper's heart ache, for it was one he could not decipher but which it was clear they both understood. It was as though they had a secret language between them, one he did not speak. And that was just one more sign of the years that had passed, the years which had changed them all.

It had been the Conn and Luned of his memory he'd been thinking of when he had turned his steps toward Britain and Ériu. How often he had imagined them! As a boy of sixteen he had blithely suggested Luned wed him; later he had assured Conn that he felt toward her as a brother to a sister, and at the time, that had been truth. But gradually her image grew sharper in his mind in some ways, softer and less distinct in others, and he began to see her at once in both lights, and in neither. He had taken no lover in the eastern lands – wanted no lover, once it was clear to him Cynan's eyes would not turn his way – but in the place in his heart where a lover might be he held only Luned.

No, not only Luned. Luned, and also Conn. Conn's image had also shifted in his mind during their time apart. He had been bought as his body-servant and gained his freedom through Prosper's encouragement, and through it all he had become both something like a brother, as Luned had become a sister. But like Luned, he had become something more.

Now Luned and Conn had married each other, and there was no room in it for him. Perhaps he should have better stayed in Constantinople.

"But I bore you with this talk," he said, jumping to his feet. The movement disturbed Gelert, who had been dozing there and who let out a small, unhappy whine.

"Hush!" scolded Luned, with a quick look toward the shadows where Áine slept. With a last woeful look Gelert subsided, pushing his head against Prosper's legs.

"I thank you for caring for him while I was absent. I will take him with me when I leave."

"Leave? No, you must not leave, now you are here!"

"I would not intrude upon your family," he said, and now his voice was dull and flat; they were words he knew he must say, but he disliked saying them.

"But you do not intrude. We have been waiting this age for you, Prosper, and look, now again it is the three of us together." 

But it was not three, thought Prosper; it was two and one.

"You are three, yes: you and Conn and your daughter. You do not need a fourth."

Luned raised her chin, and he recognized her exasperated frown. It was the face she made when Old Nurse had chided her for kilting up her skirts and running across the meadow. "You are being completely foolish," she said, and she put down her needlework and came to stand before him, so close that he could smell the soap she used on her hair. She took his hands again, and this time she would not let him shake free.

"There is something we would show you." She led him to the far end of the room, where a low shelf held the clothes kists, and Gelert trotted after them. She pulled out a small one; its carved lid held the likeness of a bird. It was just a few strokes cut into the wood, but he could see the sharp beak, the bright eye, the head cocked to look about. "This holds Áine's things." 

Prosper had to smile, for the bird did indeed bear some resemblance to the little girl. "A very clever carving," he said.

"A woodworker did these for us, in payment for some tools that Conn made him. Now see, this large one is Conn's. And this one is mine." Conn's kist was big and square, and the carved sword-blade echoed the straight lines of its lid. Luned's was decorated with a jumping fish, and Prosper had to marvel again at how cunningly the artist had shown motion and grace with only a few precise strokes.

Then she pulled another kist forward on the shelf, so that the firelight caught the pattern on the lid.

It was an archangel with folded wings.

"Can you guess whose this is, Prosper?" she said very quietly. "It has been sitting here waiting for you."

"It is…" he started, and then he had to stop, and swallow past the lump in his throat that seemed to have lodged there suddenly. "It is a beautiful carving." His hand went of itself to stroke the line of one wing. "Not exactly like that of the dagger, but beautiful in itself."

"Every artist does things in his particular way," said Conn. He had come up behind Prosper so silently that Prosper hadn't noticed he was there until he spoke. Putting his hands on Prosper's shoulders, he added, "You are so intent on making patterns of other people's lives, yet you don't see the pattern of your own."

They both stood close to him, so close that it seemed to him that the heat from the hearth could not compare to the warmth of their bodies. His mouth felt dry. It was as though he were running blindfolded toward Epona's Leap again, the great stones at the edge of the cliff, the emptiness beyond…

But this time, Conn and Luned were here to catch him; and so he closed his eyes, and jumped.

"Yes," he said. He leaned back against Conn's broad chest, pulled Luned toward him. "Yes."

"Oh, good," said Luned. She leaned up on her toes and kissed him on the lips. Her lips were soft and she smelled of the hearth-fire and of the beer they had been drinking. Behind him, Conn bent to press his lips against Prosper's neck.

"You will stay, then?" murmured Conn, and Prosper could do nothing but nod helplessly, and give himself up to the embrace of his friends.

Then Gelert butted against his legs again, and he stumbled toward the shelf, against the kist with the carved archangel on its lid. As it slid back he heard it rattle.

"So it is not waiting empty for me after all," he said, when he had breath to speak again. "You have stored something there."

"It is for you," said Conn. He pulled the kist out again and opened it, reached inside and pulled out a dagger. "I made it for you, as you and Cynan were returning the other. Though I'm afraid I have not the skill to fashion an angel."

The pommel fit neatly into Prosper's hand, and he turned it this way and that. It was not shaped into the form of an archangel, but he could feel that neither was it a simple straight hilt, and so he held it to the light so he could see. 

Three thick strands shaped the hilt: three strands intertwined in a braid, like the plaits of Luned's hair. "The three of us together. Thank you," he whispered, tracing its lines with a finger one last time before replacing it into the kist, and he did not mean only the dagger or the carving or their arms around him, but all of it, everything.

"So did you after all return the archangel dagger to its owner?" asked Conn.

"We did, and it gladdened his heart. But he was amazed that it had made its way so far across the world and then home again."

"But that is not so amazing," said Luned. "For you have done so as well."

"So I have." He looked at them both there in the fire-light; Luned's quick smile and soft hair, Conn's quiet, solid strength. "And it gladdens my heart to finally be home."


End file.
